Trends & Technologies

Photo: Decisions Decisions; Andrew Stawarz, CC license Companies making products sold at retail stores long ago realized they had minimal visibility of how their products are displayed at the retail shelf and how well their products ‘turned’ and produced revenue for them and the retailer. But today they can have visibility, and investments in software, services, analytics, […]

Image: visualization of data showing places in New York City frequented by tourists (red) and locals (blue); by Eric Fisher; Creative Commons license. Another emerging segment of the analytics software market is data virtualization (DV), referred to by some as Information-as-a-Service (IaaS), which enables access to multiple data sources, usually in real time, without the […]

Image: opensource.com The term ‘adaptive software’ has at least two meanings: 1) software that is created with built-in capabilities to change its logic in the future; 2) software that enhances an existing software application without significantly changing the underlying code of that application. I have not seen real-world examples of 1) above, so I will focus […]

Another kind of Saas: The village of Saas-Fee and surrounding mountains, in southwestern Switzerland. Photo by Robbie Shade, CC license. Everyone has a SaaS version of the software your business is considering, right? Vendors know that terminology like SaaS and cloud trigger generally positive reactions from potential customers — having these options implies the vendor […]

Image by JDA, Inc. Flowcasting is the estimation of future demand using data about the flow of products through your supply chain, to your customer and through their network to the shelf and checkout. Ostensibly, flowcasting gives you a fresher picture of demand than traditional forecasting, which mostly uses historical demand patterns and demand spike […]

The Landmark Shopping Mall in Hong Kong. Photo by See-ming Lee, CC license. It’s now possible to string together data points collected from the shelf (POS) and upstream from there (your supply chain) to optimize your sourcing, production and distribution decisions. Application vendors are calling this Demand Signal Management (DSM). It’s not new; the same […]

Talk about disruption! An anti-Uber taxi protest in London, June 11, 2014. Photo by David Holt, CC license. Does anyone think Uber would exist without mobile computing? You might think of mobile as providing convenience, which it does, but there are deeper and more significant advantages of having mobile as an asset in parts of […]

The social network is (one of) your sales channels. Map of Facebook connections; by Michael Coghlan, CC license “Omnichannel” commerce describes the (new) reality of being able (are you able?) to sell and deliver your goods and services to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Not just sell, but carry the selling experience to the consumer in your […]

Image: Memory Bus by ARendle, CC license. In-memory computing, also known as massively parallel computing, is composed of two things: 1) huge amounts of RAM; and 2) huge amounts of processing power. In-memory computing is another technology leapfrogging the traditional data warehouse. An in-memory architecture uses data that is in the main memory (also known […]

Photo by Blake Patterson, CC license. See those app icons on your iPhone? Don’t you think it makes sense to put corporate apps on an iPhone too? Yes, as long as the interface is easy and you don’t have to type a lot on your tiny glass screen. Enterprise apps are going there, and that […]

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